Veteran Journalist

There’s still a tendency to treat Mexico as just another country with established institutions in routine communication with their counterparts in the U.S. In fact, Mexico has been overtaken – some would say mastered – by the extraordinarily violent drug cartels that have randomly killed some 200,000 Mexicans in the last ten years with no sign of slowing down. They supply the United States with almost all its illicit drugs and opiates, leading to drug wars in major American cities with a steep rise in crime. The cartel chiefs have even honored this country with their presence in upscale communities from where they can direct their extensive traffic. Read more

We’re not sure yet what the wall on the Mexican border will look like – something new and forbidding or, sensibly, an extension of the adequate steel-bar fence that already exists along parts of the border. Whatever it is, it will challenge the ingenuity of the drug cartels determined to keep their billion-dollar business going no matter what. And to be sure, there are many Americans just as anxious for the drugs and the drug money that can be put to illicit uses. Read more

Ever since he arrived on earth, man has killed and has also tried to explain why he kills – to little avail. Killing continues unabated. With due deference to the great minds that have wrestled with this conundrum, two contemporary women writers, while acknowledging that women, too, can kill, offer as persuasive an explanation as we are likely to get. Read more

In the parched desert south of Tucson is an unexpected, startling sight – a gleaming white church with two sturdy towers that is considered the finest example of Spanish colonial architecture in the United States. It’s the Roman Catholic San Xavier del Bac Mission. Read more

A border is not just a border. It’s a place of interaction of two peoples, dissimilar, maybe hostile to one another. It involves a barrier of some kind, but also a degree of negotiation, diplomacy, conciliation. That’s what Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Ruben Padillo found when he was stationed at the El Paso-Juarez checkpoint separating the U.S. and Mexico. Unexpectedly, he became the first Border Patrol liaison with the city that was called the “murder capital of the world,” and his contact was a Mexican police commander with known ties to the infamous drug cartels. It was a challenge. Read more

How did a grizzled, carousing, hard drinking Arizonan with the look of a seedy prospector manage to paint such winsome, frolicking, cherubic little children who seem to delight in life and have certainly delighted those who view them? I’m not what I seem, he said, and those who knew him agreed he was a bundle of contradictions. But there was no denying he was an artist of immense popularity who courted it by painting as much as possible on as many things as possible – more than 20 thousand canvases along with walls, bowls, plates, dresses and once, when challenged, a tortilla. Read more

One of incessant bombings of Yemen killed eight members of a family in the capital of Sanaa with only four-year-old Buthaina Muhammad Mansour surviving. She suffered a concussion and skull fractures but is expected to live. In the meantime, she is trying to open her badly swollen eyes. Her family is among thousands of Yemeni civilians killed by Saudi and U.S. bombs in a war that has no plausible explanation and is hardly in the U.S. national interest. The same is true of other current U.S. wars, which are barely reported (how many can you name?), but are no less real for that.

About

"Master of Narrative"

~Ted Lipien

This website contains the collected works, recent articles and continuing blog posts from veteran journalist Ed Warner who has been reporting for more than 55 years. Ed wrote for Time Magazine from 1958-1982 and wrote, edited and reported for the Voice of America from 1983-2005. He continues to freelance today and his articles have appeared in The American Conservative and on AntiWar.com and other news websites. More...